Rock Band 2 for Wii DLC Sort of a Myth

I got RB2 in February, and enjoyed it thoroughly. To further extend my enjoyment, I decided to buy some wii points and download some more songs.
In the middle of downloading my second song, my wifi connection got interrupted. I don’t know why, maybe my DSL is spotty, or maybe someone in my house picked up a cordless phone. It happens once in awhile when I’m playing, but it doesn’t really bother me, because I can just…play the song again.

Anyway, I reconnected and re-downloaded the song. I went to my song list, and it wasn’t there! I did a few troubleshooting things, like deleting the song and downloading it again, and even deleting the entire DLC save block from my wii data management page. I tried to delete everything and then save to an SD card, but that didn’t work either. These were the only things I could think of doing, and none of them worked.

So I searched the web for traces of similar problems, and nobody seemed to have a solution for my problem. It seems that everybody who plays Rock Band have XBox 360s.

I called Nintendo, and they gave me a breakdown of the situation. Each song is made up of two download components. The DLC data is stored in two different servers, one is the Nintendo server, the other EA. When you get disconnected in the middle of a download, the information stored in the two servers don’t sync up. One server thinks that you’ve downloaded the whole song (both components) where the other thinks you’ve only downloaded half of the song. That’s why when you go to the music store within RB2, it says that you’ve downloaded the song, but then when you go to play the song, it’s not in the song list.

Then they offered a solution for me. The only way for me to fix my situation is to send my wii in! The CSR said that it would only take 21 business days. Are you kidding me? That’s more than a month! Of course they would pay for the shipping of the console, but they wouldn’t provide a box for me to ship it in. (I find this weird because HP sends me an empty box for my computer every time it needs service)

The CSR kept emphasizing how rarely this happens, and that I shouldn’t feel worried about downloading any songs in the future…but I get disconnected all the time! I mean, obviously the fact that I get disconnected is not Nintendo’s problem, but having to send my wii in is not a sustainable solution!

He did mention that they are working on a fix for this in an upcoming wii system update. I asked for some details on the update, so that I would know when I could start downloading without worry in the future. He said that it was not going to be announced because it didn’t affect enough people, and that even if the fix was included in an update, I would never know. The only evidence of the fix would be that I would never run into this problem again…Even if I wait indefinitely for the fix, it won’t solve my current problem, so I’ll never be able to play Buddy Holly unless I send my wii to Nintendo Canada in Vancouver by ground shipping for 21 business days.

Well, I don’t know if I’ll send it in. It seems like I’ll be paying more in shipping materials than I did for the song that I never got to play. I guess one thing I could do is download every song I’m interested in with my remaining 1600 points, and then send it in for service with all the half-downloaded songs I’m sure to have.

Either way, DLC is dead to me now. Maybe I’ll just spend the remaining 1600 points on Mario Bros 3 or something. Grr.

Well, like I said, they say that it doesn’t affect enough people, so it’s not high priority.

The weird thing is, the guy was really friendly and understanding, so I didn’t even get mad at him. I only got angry when I hung up and realized that it meant that I have no good solution to my problem, and that they don’t really care.